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Open Educational Resources and Rhetorical Paradox in the Neoliberal Univers(ity)

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Author : Nora Almeida

As a phenomenon and a quandary, openness has provoked conversations about inequities within higher education systems, particularly in regards to information access, social inclusion, and pedagogical practice.

But whether or not open education can address these inequities, and to what effect, depends on what we mean by “open” and specifically, whether openness reflexively acknowledges the fraught political, economic, and ethical dimensions of higher education and of knowledge production processes.

This essay explores the ideological and rhetorical underpinnings of the open educational resource (OER) movement in the context of the neoliberal university.

This essay also addresses the conflation of value and values in higher education—particularly how OER production processes and scholarship labor are valued. Lastly, this essay explores whether OER initiatives provide an opportunity to reimagine pedagogical practices, to reconsider authority paradigms, and potentially, to dismantle and redress exclusionary educational practices in and outside of the classroom.

Through a critique of neoliberalism as critically limiting, an exploration of autonomy, and a refutation of the precept that OER can magically solve social inequalities in higher education, the author ultimately advocates for a reconsideration of OER in context and argues that educators should prioritize conversations about what openness means within their local educational communities.

URL : Open Educational Resources and Rhetorical Paradox in the Neoliberal Univers(ity)

Alternative location : http://libraryjuicepress.com/journals/index.php/jclis/article/view/16

Inventory of Research Data Management Services in France

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Author : Violaine Rebouillat

Data has become more and more ubiquitous in the research context. As a result, a growing number of services are created to analyze, store and share research data. This has induced the Research Data Working Group of the Digital Scientific Library (BSN10) to launch an inventory of French research data management services, funded by the Ministry of Higher Education and Research.

The inventory covers all services that are managed by French institutions and infrastructures and dedicated to public research teams from all fields. Sixty services, provided by forty-five structures, have already been identified and analyzed.

The paper describes the methodology used to carry out the inventory and analyzes these first results by service type, scope and research field. It also emphasizes the heterogeneous and emergent nature of the inventoried services.

URL : Inventory of Research Data Management Services in France

Alternative location : http://ebooks.iospress.nl/publication/46651

Claims About Benefits of Open Access to Society (Beyond Academia)

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Author : ElHassan ElSabry

This study tries to systematically identify claims about societal benefits of Open Access by analyzing different documents written by Open Access supporters. Three types of documents are used: key declarations and statements in support of Open Access, Open Access policies issued by public funding agencies and journal editorials announcing the adoption of Open Access.

Analysis shows these three types emphasize different benefits for Open Access as they address different audience. There is strong support of the idea that Open Access has benefits to different groups of people outside side the university/credentialed research institutes.

It is not clear how much evidence is available to support these claims, but identifying them would suggest new stakeholders to involve in the conversation and perhaps also inform the ongoing debate about who should bear the cost of Open Access.

URL : Claims About Benefits of Open Access to Society (Beyond Academia)

Alternative location : http://ebooks.iospress.nl/publication/46640

Framing a Situated and Inclusive Open Science: Emerging Lessons from the Open and Collaborative Science in Development Network

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Authors : Rebecca Hillyer, Alejandro Posada, Denisse Albornoz, Leslie Chan, Angela Okune

What is open science and under what conditions could it contribute towards addressing persistent development challenges? How could we re-imagine and enrich open science so that it is inclusive of local realities and a diversity of knowledge traditions?

These are some of the questions that the Open and Collaborative Science in Development Network (OCSDNet) is attempting to answer.

In this paper, we provide the rationale and principles underlying OCSDnet, the conceptual and methodological frameworks guiding the research, and preliminary findings from the network’s twelve globally diverse research projects.

Instead of a “one-size-fits-all” approach to open science, our findings suggest that it is important to take into account the local dynamics and power structures that affect the ways in which individuals tend to collaborate (or not) within particular contexts.

Despite the on-going resistance of powerful actors towards new forms of creating and sharing diverse knowledge, concluding evidence from the twelve research teams suggests that open science does indeed have an important role to play in facilitating inclusive collaboration and transformatory possibilities for development.

URL : Framing a Situated and Inclusive Open Science: Emerging Lessons from the Open and Collaborative Science in Development Network

Alternative location : http://ebooks.iospress.nl/publication/46639

Openness in Scholarship: A Return to Core Values?

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Author : Cameron Neylon

The debate over the meaning, and value, of open movements has intensified. The fear of co-option of various efforts from Open Access to Open Data is driving a reassessment and re-definition of what is intended by “open”.

In this article I apply group level models from cultural studies and economics to argue that the tension between exclusionary group formation and identity and aspirations towards inclusion and openness are a natural part of knowledge-making.

Situating the traditional Western Scientific Knowledge System as a culture-made group, I argue that the institutional forms that support the group act as economic underwriters for the process by which groups creating exclusive knowledge invest in the process of making it more accessible, less exclusive, and more public-good-like, in exchange for receiving excludable goods that sustain the group.

A necessary consequence of this is that our institutions will be conservative in their assessment of what knowledge-goods are worth of consideration and who is allowed within those institutional systems. Nonetheless the inclusion of new perspectives and increasing diversity underpins the production of general knowledge.

I suggest that instead of positioning openness as new, and in opposition to traditional closed systems, it may be more productive to adopt a narrative in which efforts to increase inclusion are seen as a very old, core value of the academy, albeit one that is a constant work in progress.

URL : Openness in Scholarship: A Return to Core Values?

Institutional repositories as infrastructures for long-term preservation

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Authors : Helena Francke, Jonas Gamalielsson, Björn Lundell

Introduction

The study describes the conditions for long-term preservation of the content of the institutional repositories of Swedish higher education institutions based on an investigation of how deposited files are managed with regards to file format and how representatives of the repositories describe the functions of the repositories.

Method

The findings are based on answers to a questionnaire completed by thirty-four institutional repository representatives (97% response rate).

Analysis

Questionnaire answers were analysed through descriptive statistics and qualitative coding. The concept of information infrastructures was used to analytically discuss repository work.

Results

Visibility and access to content were considered to be the most important functions of the repositories, but long-term preservation was also considered important for publications and student theses.

Whereas a majority of repositories had some form of guidelines for which file formats were accepted, very few considered whether or not file formats constitute open standards. This can have consequences for the long-term sustainability and access of the content deposited in the repositories.

Conclusion

The study contributes to the discussion about the sustainability of research publications and data in the repositories by pointing to the potential difficulties involved for long-term preservation and access when there is little focus on and awareness of open file formats.

URL : http://www.informationr.net/ir/22-2/paper757.html

Student perceptions of writing with Wikipedia in Australian higher education

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Authors : Robert Cummings, Frances DiLauro

The benefits of teaching with Wikipedia in higher education have been investigated for more than a decade and practitioners have claimed a fairly uniform set of outcomes. Although Wikipedia is a global knowledge platform, many studies of the benefits of teaching with Wikipedia have been conducted in U.S. higher education institutions.

The authors taught with Wikipedia in writing classes at the University of Sydney, Australia, surveying and interviewing students to both verify the traditional benefits of teaching with Wikipedia and investigate a new set of perceived benefits.

This study finds evidence that students who worked with Wikipedia in the writing classroom remained neutral in their opinions as to the legitimacy of information on Wikipedia and skeptical as to its utility in mastering writing course outcomes.

DOI : http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/7488